Garibaldy is unable to do the SISSoftW this week for reasons beyond his control, so it’s over to you all… Once more I’ve briefly looked for a Sunday Independent Sensible Statement of the Week… but to be honest, the closest that fits that bill is this entire piece from Gene Kerrigan… meanwhile, over to you…

You don’t need to be much of a lawyer to know that when it comes to political debate, words like “illegal in international law” or “war crimes” are often used as if these were proven matters of fact rather than, as they sometimes are, tendentious and biased opinions.

So there you go! Cllr Humphreys clearly hasn’t realised the concept of not leaving hostages to fortune for oneself in the future. This also begs mention:

What gets me about the Middle East is how threatened people seem to be by the only Jewish state in the world.

There’s fortunately a lack of brutal occupations against UN resolutions at the moment, dear Richard. Not to mention that Israel does have a rather large nuclear weapon arsenal…

It seems that every other week there’s another zionist shill on the Sindo defending illegal occupation and apartheid. I have to wonder what’s in it for them? The anti-public sector rubbish is at least populist with a certain section of society but I suspect that the vast majority of readers have more sympathy for the Palestinians or don’t care/have no knowledge of what’s going on over there!

I guess Humphrey’s is politically a Zionist – and it is in fairness a political viewpoint, though not one most of us would share – at least not to such a seemingly unquestioning and uncritical extent. What’s odd is that they don’t present the other side of the story. But I suspect it’s purely to reinforce the ‘contrarian’ image they like to present the paper as having.

This worship of a charismatically ruthless narcissist is not a uniquely American disorder, merely human. Hence Churchill in Britain and Collins here, both addicted to bloodshed, and both utter failures in their larger ambitions: one to create a united Irish Republic – still no sign – and the other to defend a thousand-year empire: didn’t even last seven. And both still revered.

How does this creature still get published? This is jaw-dropping: “It’s surely not coincidental that some of the first blacks to be outstanding in their respective fields in the US – Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte and Colin Powell – were not of American slave stock at all, but Caribbean.” I presume that Myers has never heard of, to name but two, Louis Armstrong or Frederick Douglass. I suppose it’s all par for the course for the man who wrote :“Frankly, no one comes out the lock-out very well, least of all the strike leader Jim Larkin and the boss of the Dublin United Tramway Company, William Martin Murphy.
But Larkin, having brought his workers to utter penury in a futile and vainglorious struggle that was all about class warfare, not economics, then high-tailed it to the US, whereas Murphy stayed to run his business empire. What Ireland needed then (as now) is simple: fewer Larkins and more Murphys.
Forget the fact-free stereotypes you were fed at school or absorbed in that risible travesty, James Plunkett’s ‘Strumpet City’. Before the lock-out, Dublin United Tramways was one of the most efficient urban transport companies in Europe, and profitable too: in 1912, it paid a 6pc dividend.
And contrary to popular myth, Murphy actually encouraged his workers to join a union: it was political syndicalism such as Larkin’s that he opposed. In 1912, the Tramway Employees Benevolent Society, representing 900 of the DUT employees, reported assets of £5,991, of which £4,798 was invested in Dublin United Tramways stock.” (http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/kevin-myers/kevin-myers-completely-inept-everywhere-no-wonder-cie-is-at-end-of-the-line-3348851.html)
If only those left-wing troublemakers let entrepreneurs get on with it, eh? We’d all be a lot happier!

Another man generally regarded as being ‘outstanding in his respective field’ that Myers may not have heard of, who described himself as a Southerner (his father was from New Orleans and his mother was from Maryland): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryuAW_gnjYQ

Jonathan you deserve a prize for managing to get through that. There are some who will provide an apologia for reactionary events, however extreme, and will continue to do it again and again (as well as throwing in gratuitously offensive stuff like that about ‘slave stock’).

What is remarkable about Myers’ comment is not simply how offensive it is, but it is so palpably and demonstratably untrue (the fact that Americans have a special day that celebrates a non-Caribbean Southern black man, who had a dream, may disprove his argument). I mean, if you’re going to make stuff up, at least put a bit of work into it…

The start of Obama’s second term coincides with the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the 50th anniversary of King’s March on Washington, and he has chosen to take the public oath with his hand on both their bibles stacked together.

“Their actions, the movements they represented are the only reason it’s possible for me to be inaugurated,” Obama said of Lincoln and King in a video released Friday by the Presidential Inaugural Committee.

I knoew its foolish to even treat these arguments with the dignity of engagement, but when he makes a distinction between ‘slave-stock’ and caribbeans, is there any validity in that?
The Caribbean doesn’t have an indigenous black community, does it. Isn’t the majority of the caribbean black population also descended from slaves?

Myers has previous form here: in this article (http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/kevin-myers/kevin-myers-obama-is-the-kind-of-man-who-should-not-be-allowed-near-the-triggers-in-the-white-house-2994040.html), not only does he call Barack Obama a mulatto (Wiki: “The term is not commonly used any more but is generally considered archaic because of its association with slavery, colonial and racial oppression”) but states “To be sure, no ending of slavery in the US was going to provide a happy ending for all concerned, and the after-effects endure still. Is it entirely coincidental that neither of the two foremost modern Americans with African ancestry, Colin Powell and Barack Obama, is descended from American slaves?” In other words, the American Civil War is responsible for 150 years of underachieving African-Americans? Like Martin Luther King Jr and Muhammad Ali (and one could make a list that would fill many pages)? Is Myers sane?